29 April 2005:

CDC pushes new mosquito repellents
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- After years of promoting the chemical DEET as the best defense against West Nile-bearing mosquitoes, the government for the first time is recommending the use of two other insect repellents. Repellents containing the chemical picaridin or the oil of lemon eucalyptus offer "long-lasting protection against mosquito bites," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, adding that repellents with DEET remain on the agency's recommendation list. [more - CNN]

28 April 2005:

Ebola-like disease kills 253 people
LUANDA, Angola (Reuters) -- The death toll in Angola's Marburg epidemic has topped 250, but medical experts said on Thursday they were confident the world's worst outbreak of the killer virus would soon be reined in. [more - CNN]

ULV blocks meningitis spread
LA VERNE -- A case of potentially deadly bacterial meningitis had University of La Verne administrators and county health workers scrambling Tuesday to prevent a possible outbreak of the contagious disease. Antibiotics have been handed out since Sunday to about 90 students who either lived in the same residence hall or might have come into close contact with the infected student. [more - Daily Bulletin]

Flu Vaccine Supply May Be Tight, but Not Severe, Officials Say
The Chiron Corporation said yesterday that it anticipates making only about half as many doses of flu vaccine this year as it had intended to provide last year, before its factory was shut down because of bacterial contamination. Still, authorities said, the expected production from Chiron should be enough to stave off a severe shortage of the vaccine this winter, though it is possible supply could still be somewhat tight. [more - NY Times]

27 April 2005:

RSV Moves from the Nursery to the Geriatric Set
ROCHESTER, NY -- The real culprit in respiratory infections among elderly patients may not be influenza but respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), usually considered a disease confined to the nursery. So reported a University of Rochester group in the April 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine on the basis of a four-year prospective, diagnosis-specific study. [more - CNN]

26 April 2005:

Mysterious Viruses as Bad as They Get
UíGE, Angola -- Traditional healers here say their grandmothers knew of a bleeding disease similar to the current epidemic of hemorrhagic fever that has killed 244 of the 266 people who have contracted it. The grandmothers even had a treatment for the sickness, the healers told Dr. Boris I. Pavlin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the remedy has been lost. The old disease was called kifumbe, the word in the Kikongo language for murder. But kifumbe did not seem to be contagious. And so, Dr. Pavlin said, though he did not doubt it was real, it was probably not the same as the disease in Uíge today. The current disease, caused by the Marburg virus, is contagious. Like the Ebola virus, to which it is closely related, it is spread by bodily fluids like blood, vomit and saliva. [more - NY Times]

25 April 2005:

Specialists Say 'Healers' in Angola Are Helping to Spread Deadly Virus
JOHANNESBURG -- International health specialists battling an outbreak of Marburg virus in Angola suspect that unorthodox medical practices by local traditional healers may be contributing to the spread of the deadly disease. The experts suggest that the healers, who lack medical training and supplies but are a substitute for doctors in many rural African communities, are administering injections in homes or in makeshift clinics with reused needles or syringes. [more - NY Times]

Researchers: Antibody may treat West Nile
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Targeted proteins called monoclonal antibodies may work to treat West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease that came to North America in 1999, researchers said Sunday. [more - CNN]

Garden-variety vaccines may be edible alternative
Someday, getting inoculated against diseases may be as easy as munching on tomatoes and lettuce or swallowing capsules stuffed with genetically altered vegetables. Already, plant biologists have devised an experimental potato-derived vaccine that reduces the risk of contracting hepatitis B, a viral infection that attacks the liver. [more - LA Times]

24 April 2005:

Group: Drug shortage endangers malaria fight
GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said on Friday a malaria drug shortage would cost lives and jeopardize a global plan to halve malaria deaths by 2010. The aid agency demanded the World Health Organization (WHO), which relied on Swiss drug maker Novartis to provide its drug Coartem at cost for use in developing countries, turn to other suppliers to save lives. [more - CNN]

O.C. Alters Rules, Will Share Data on West Nile Victims
When James M. Damiano became the first person in the state to die from the West Nile virus last year, health officials never alerted his neighbors in Fullerton, where it was presumed he was bitten by disease-carrying mosquitoes. They didn't mention West Nile virus to the 57-year-old man's family either. They didn't even alert the county agency whose job it is to fight mosquitoes. [more - LA Times]

22 April 2005:

Human mad cow case in Netherlands
A patient in the Dutch city of Utrecht has been diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a human form of mad cow disease, the Dutch Health Ministry said. The ministry, in a statement issued Thursday, said it is "the first known case" in the Netherlands. [more - CNN]

Bird Flu Hits Vietnam Right Where It Hurts
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- To know the effect of avian influenza here, order a steaming bowl of pho ga, or chicken noodle soup -- if you can find one. Since last year, pho ga has virtually disappeared in this soup-obsessed city, which has more noodle shops than Seattle has espresso bars. [more - LA Times]

AIDS Patients See Life, Death Issues in Trade Pact
GUATEMALA CITY -- Carmina Garcia rises before the sun each morning, taking pleasure in the first yellow rays of dawn. But it's the pink and white tablets that keep her going. Found to be HIV-positive shortly before her husband died of AIDS-related complications last fall, an ailing Garcia was convinced of her own death sentence. But generic drugs have kept the virus in check and restored 60 lost pounds to her frame. [more - LA Times]

Most Killer Flu Samples Are Found, Destroyed
At least 99% of the killer flu samples mistakenly sent to laboratories around the world by a medical supply house have been recovered and destroyed, and there have been no infections, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials have been scrambling since it was learned that the strain was sent to 3,757 labs in the U.S. and abroad. [more - LA Times]

21 April 2005:

Antibiotics Faulted as Heart Treatment
Treating heart attack victims with antibiotics does not reduce the risk of having a second heart attack or dying, according to two large trials reported today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers had hoped the drugs would kill the common bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae, which was found in arterial plaque in three-quarters of heart attack patients. Its presence had been shown to double the risk of subsequent attacks, and some small studies had suggested that killing it with antibiotics would reduce the risk. [more - LA Times]

20 April 2005:

Quick Tests for West Nile Aid in Battle
As part of a statewide effort to combat the spread of the potentially deadly West Nile virus, San Bernardino County is one of nearly 20 in California using new viral testing methods that provide almost instant results, authorities said Tuesday. [more - LA Times]

18 April 2005:

A vaccine's gift
In the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a survivor of polio, sparked one of the greatest biomedical breakthroughs of the century. He did it by starting a fundraising campaign. His efforts drew ridicule from those who said the nation could never defeat polio when citizens could barely feed their families. But everyone, Roosevelt argued, could spare a dime. Seventeen years later, the March of Dimes, the campaign Roosevelt began, claimed success in its effort to find a vaccine that, in time, would make the terrifying polio summers a part of American history. [more - LA Times]

16 April 2005:

Door-to-Door Search for a Killer Virus in Angola
UíGE, Angola -- For nearly four weeks, teams of health experts have been trying to set up a rescue operation in this town of windowless, crumbling buildings with no running water, intermittent electricity, poor sanitation and a perennially jammed telephone network. They are trying to contain the world's worst outbreak of one of the world's most frightening viruses, known as Marburg. But with the death toll rising every day, no one is predicting success soon. [more - NY Times]

Containing a Virus
Audio & Photo Presentation: Denise Grady narrates a look at the efforts to contain a deadly virus in Angola. [more - NY Times]

Bacteriologist created crucial penicillin doses in 1944
Aloysius A. Aita had only one way to get penicillin for patients in Upland in 1944 -- he had to make it himself. So the man who was San Antonio Community Hospital's administrator for 32 years undertook the rather extraordinary act of brewing up batches of the newly developed "miracle drug," which at the time was impossible to obtain any other way. [more - Daily Bulletin]

15 April 2005:

WHO: Most labs destroyed killer flu virus
GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Some two-thirds of the 3,700 laboratories worldwide that received samples of a killer flu virus in test kits have destroyed them as instructed, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. [more - CNN]

14 April 2005:

Opinions conflict on why flu strain sent
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal officials are still at a loss to explain how a potentially deadly strain of influenza could be sent to more than 4,000 labs around the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is operating under the presumption that the H2N2 strain was purposefully included in the panels designed to test the labs' proficiency in identifying viruses. [more - CNN]

Flu virus debacle sheds light on archaic shipping system
Every day, deadly germs are shipped across the country and around the globe, right alongside the books, gourmet foods and birthday presents sent through FedEx Corp. and similar couriers. Often their journeys can be circuitous, too. Follow, for instance, a single vial of the potentially deadly flu virus causing a world health scare because it was included in test kits sent to more than 4,000 laboratories. It was grown in a Virginia lab, spent time in a Cincinnati freezer and passed through a small medical company on the Mexican border before it finally arrived at a Milwaukee lab. [more - Daily Bulletin]

Risk From Deadly Flu Strain Is Called Low
Even as health officials scrambled yesterday to unravel the mystery of how a deadly strain of influenza virus was sent to thousands of laboratories around the world, they declared the risk that anyone would develop influenza was very low. In 1957, the strain, known as A(H2N2), caused an estimated one million to four million deaths in a pandemic known as Asian flu, but it has not been detected in this country since 1968. [more - NY Times]

No Infection Seen From Lab Test Kits With Lethal Flu Strain
There is no evidence that anybody has been infected by a potentially lethal influenza test sample sent to thousands of laboratories worldwide, but laboratory personnel who worked with the samples should be closely monitored for flu symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. [more - LA Times]

13 April 2005:

Labs told to destroy killer flu virus
The World Health Organization urged laboratories Tuesday to destroy samples of a flu virus sent out for testing purposes after a Canadian lab identified the virus as a strain that triggered the 1957 Asian flu pandemic. A spokesman for the organization that distributed the virus, known as influenza A/H2N2, said it came from a vendor and its distribution was clearly a mistake. [More - CNN]

Deadly 1957 Strain of Flu Is Found in Lab-Test Kits
Nearly 5,000 laboratories, mostly in the United States, were working Tuesday to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain that were sent as part of a routine kit to test labs. The rush action, recommended by the World Health Organization of the United Nations, was prompted by a slim risk that the samples could start a global flu epidemic. The vials were sent by a company in the United States to labs in 18 countries, officials said. [More - NY Times]

PR Campaign Targets Virus Outbreak in Angola
Health workers begin a public-relations campaign to help Angolans stop the spread of the Marburg virus, which has killed 203 people in western Angola. According to local custom, people with the highly contagious virus shouldn't be cared for or buried. As a result, health workers have been treated with suspicion and mistrust. [More - NPR]

Maurice R. Hilleman, 85; Scientist Developed Many Vaccines That Saved Millions of Lives
Maurice R. Hilleman, the vaccine developer who may have saved more lives than any other scientist of the 20th century, died from cancer Sunday at Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. He was 85. In a remarkably productive career, Hilleman and his team Hilleman and his team created more than 40 human and animal vaccines, including those for measles, mumps, chickenpox, rubella, hepatitis A and B, and meningitis. [More - LA Times]

12 April 2005:

ESSAY: When Polio, Every Parent's Nightmare, Fell to Dr. Salk
For much of the first half of the 20th century, polio conjured up every parent's worst nightmare: children who could not walk without steel braces; others imprisoned in large tank respirators called iron lungs, gasping for every breath. Still others died. But on April 12, 1955, Americans learned that Dr. Jonas Salk had developed a safe and effective vaccine against polio. Thanks to successful immunization programs in the decades since, parents today can rest easy knowing that polio is preventable and rare. [More - NY Times]

Salk Polio Vaccine Conquered Terrifying Disease Fifty years ago, on April 12, 1955, the world he
ard one of the most eagerly anticipated announcements in medical history: Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine worked. The vaccine turned a disease that once horrified America into a memory. [More - NPR]

Clinton Starts AIDS Drug Plan
Former President Bill Clinton said yesterday that 10,000 children in 10 countries would get inexpensive AIDS drugs under a plan negotiated by his foundation. He also announced that with the foundation's help, a well-known program treating rural Haitians will move to Africa for the first time, opening a pilot project in Rwanda. [More - NY Times]

A Daunting Search: Tracking a Deadly Virus in Angola
UíGE, Angola, April 11 -- The staff in the pediatric ward of í's regional hospital suspected something was terribly wrong as early as October, when children who had been admitted with seemingly treatable illnesses began, suddenly and wrenchingly, to die. But were those early deaths caused by the Marburg virus? If they were, and had they been diagnosed at the time, might the current epidemic have been averted? [More - NY Times]

A Primer on Marburg Virus
Marburg is a rare, severe form of hemorrhagic fever closely related to the Ebola virus. In both diseases, victims bleed to death, often from every orifice and every organ. Few infections are as deadly. [More - NPR]

Maurice Hilleman, Master in Creating Vaccines, Dies at 85
Dr. Maurice R. Hilleman, a microbiologist who developed vaccines for mumps, measles, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis and other diseases, saving tens of millions of lives, died yesterday at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 85. The cause was cancer, said a son-in-law, Greg Slamowitz. Raised on a farm in Montana, Dr. Hilleman credited much of his success to his boyhood work with chickens, whose eggs form the foundation of so many vaccines. [More - NY Times]

Angola Launches Marburg Campaign as Toll Tops 200
LUANDA -- Angola launched a massive public information campaign on Tuesday in a bid to stamp out the killer Marburg virus as the toll from the worst ever outbreak topped 200. Five TV and radio advertisements in both the official language Portuguese and the most widely spoken local languages were broadcast throughout the day on national media. "The only way to control this epidemic is to stop the transmission. People need to adapt their behavior, put in practice preventative measures," UNICEF spokesman Celso Malavoloneke told Reuters. [More - Reuters]

Lessons of the Kissing Bug's Deadly Gift
BUENOS AIRES -- When there is an extraordinary new outbreak of a well-known disease, it can provide new insights into how the disease is spread. A case in point is Chagas' disease, which exists only in the Americas, where it has infected an estimated 16 million people and causes about 50,000 deaths each year. [More - NY Times]

11 April 2005:

In the West, a Wet Winter Brings Blooms -- and Threats
SAN DIEGO -- After the record rains and snows of winter, vast swaths of the Southwest have been transformed by color. The coastal foothills of California lie blanketed by patches of yellow mustard blooms, and the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona are drowned in once-in-a-century seas of grasses and wildflowers. Yet the wet winter has also led to three threats: West Nile virus, wildfires and swarms of bees. [More - NY Times]

Health Workers Race to Block Deadly Virus in Angolan Town
UíGE, Angola, April 10 -- Larrinda Pinto died Thursday, probably unaware of the frantic effort that would follow by emergency medical workers hoping to block the spread of the Marburg virus that claimed her life. Someone alerted one of the mobile teams of health workers that scour neighborhoods here daily that Mrs. Pinto, a 42-year-old pediatric nurse, appeared to have become another victim of the Marburg epidemic, which is centered in this northern province, also called Uíge. [More - NY Times]

Study: Hospital keyboards can spread germs
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Harmful bacteria can survive as long as 24 hours on computer keyboards, a study released Monday showed, highlighting what could be a growing threat as hospitals increase investment in technology. The study carried out at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago found that keyboards can contaminate the fingers, bare or gloved, of a nurse or doctor, who could then transfer bacteria to patients. [More - CNN]

Polio shots launched era of vaccines
Dan Wilson remembers being a frightened 5-year-old, hearing grown-ups talking about tests as he lay on a daybed in the screened porch of his central Wisconsin home in 1955. "One of the tests was whether you could lift your head off the bed," he said. "I remember not being able to do that, and wondering what that meant." It meant polio, one of the most feared diseases of all time. The viral illness paralyzed tens of thousands of children in the United States and half a million worldwide each year. [More - CNN]

10 April 2005:

WHO Goes on Defensive as It Fights Angola Outbreak
LUANDA, Angola -- World Health Organization teams fighting an outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus in Angola were forced to suspend work after scared residents in one afflicted area stoned the workers' vehicles, officials said Saturday. [More - LA Times]

To Contain Virus in Angola, Group Wants Hospital Closed
UIGE, Angola, April 9 - An international medical charity battling a hemorrhagic fever that so far has killed 181 Angolans has urged the government to close the regional hospital here, at the center of the outbreak, saying the medical center itself is a source of the deadly infection. [More - NY Times]

COMMENTARY: The Unsung Women in the Race for the Polio Vaccine
Fifty years ago this week, one of the great breakthroughs in medical history was announced. A polio vaccine, produced by Jonas Salk and a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, was finally declared to be safe and effective. Salk became an instant hero, America's first celebrity-scientist, a miracle worker in a starched white lab coat . . . . What is too often lost in this hagiography is the extraordinary role played by other scientists, the ones who blazed the trail that Salk followed to completion. Two of the most prominent were women: Dorothy Horstmann at Yale and Isabel Morgan at Johns Hopkins University. [More - LA Times]

Town's Venison Banquet Puts a State on Alert
VERONA, N.Y., April 7 - For years, David L. Smith cooked wild game for his Fire Department's annual fund-raising sportsmen banquet. It was his way to help out after he retired from the department's volunteer corps. At this year's banquet, on March 13, more than 300 townsfolk sampled his dishes -- the venison meatballs, chili and patties. Three weeks later, Mr. Smith was trying to forget the whole affair with a whiskey at the local V.F.W. "My wife said they'd come to get me," he said. Through unlucky circumstance, tissue samples from a deer that one farmer donated for the banquet tested positive for chronic wasting disease, and the results were discovered after the meat had been eaten at the banquet. It is the deer version of mad cow disease, and the first documented case in New York. [More - NY Times]

9 April 2005:

Attacks Halt WHO Campaign Against Marburg in Angola
LUANDA (Reuters) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) has halted a campaign in western Angola against an outbreak of Marburg virus after residents attacked its teams in apparent fear they could be spreading the deadly infection. Angola's Marburg epidemic has claimed at least 183 lives from a total of 205 cases, according to the latest health department figures, making it the worst outbreak of the disease yet. [More - Reuters]

Florida Outbreak of E. Coli Is Traced to 6 Petting-Zoo Animals
ORLANDO, Fla., April 8 -- Six farm animals at a Florida petting zoo have been identified as the source of the potentially deadly strain of E. coli bacteria that caused more than 26 people, most of them children, to be hospitalized, state health officials said Friday. As a result, the officials said, all 37 animals at the zoo have been quarantined. [More - NY Times]

Fear and Violence Accompany a Deadly Virus Across Angola
LUANDA, Angola, April 8 - The death toll in Angola from an epidemic caused by an Ebola-like virus rose to 174 Friday as aid workers in one northern provincial town reported that terrified people had attacked them and that a number of health workers had fled out of fear of catching the disease. [More - NY Times]

8 April 2005:

U.N.: Angola Virus Epidemic Not Controlled
GENEVA (AP) -- Medical experts are having some success countering an outbreak of a deadly Ebola-like virus in Angola, but it has yet to be brought fully under control, the U.N. health agency said Friday. The rare Marburg virus has killed 174 people out of a total 200 cases, said Dr. Mike Ryan, director of alert and response operations for the World Health Organization. [More - NY Times]

Tomatoes Blamed for Sickening 561
ATLANTA, April 7 (Reuters) - Contaminated tomatoes were the likely cause of salmonella outbreaks that made at least 561 people sick in the United States and Canada last summer, federal health officials said Thursday. [More - NY Times]

7 April 2005:

Study Finds Spread of Resistant Staph
Dangerous drug-resistant staphylococcus infections are showing up at an alarming rate outside hospitals and nursing homes in the United States, researchers are reporting today. Until recently, these hard-to-treat cases were seen only in hospitals and other health-care settings, where they can spread to patients with open wounds or tubes and cause serious complications. Now doctors are seeing resistant strains among inmates, children and athletes. [More - NY Times]

Perilous Bug Is Creeping Onto the Streets
Drug-resistant staph infections, once largely confined to hospitals, are far more common in the general population than previously thought, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. [More - LA Times]

Judge: Pentagon Can Resume Anthrax Shots
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon can resume giving anthrax vaccinations, but only to troops who volunteer for them, said a federal judge who had banned the shots amid safety questions. [More - LA Times]

6 April 2005:

Air Team Puts West Nile Virus in Sights
Stepping up efforts to combat West Nile virus, San Gabriel Valley vector control officials on Tuesday enlisted the help of the Pasadena Police Department's air support team to help locate dirty swimming pools attractive to mosquitoes. [More - LA Times]

5 April 2005:

Should We All Be Stocking Tamiflu?
As a hedge against a possible worldwide pandemic of bird flu in humans, the governments of at least 17 countries have in recent weeks begun ordering stockpiles of Tamiflu, the potent antiviral drug with a sunny Sandra Dee of a name. [More - NY Times]

Avian Flu in North Korean Chickens Called Less Lethal
HONG KONG, April 5 -- Chickens in North Korea are suffering from a rare outbreak of H7 avian influenza, and not the more lethal H5N1 avian influenza virus that has infected poultry across Southeast Asia, a United Nations official said today. [More - Ny Times]

4 April 2005:

States hold largest anti-terror drill
HILLSIDE, New Jersey (AP) -- The biggest anti-terrorism drill ever held in the United States got under way Monday with a mock biological attack in New Jersey and a simulated chemical-weapons explosion in Connecticut.Named TOPOFF 3, the $16 million, weeklong exercise is meant to find weak spots in the nation's emergency planning. [More - CNN]

Some Asian Bankers Worry About the Economic Toll From Bird Flu
HONG KONG -- Investment banks are starting to issue warnings on the risks that avian influenza poses to the economies and financial markets of East Asia, even as health experts struggle to assess whether the disease has the potential to cause a pandemic at all. [More - Ny Times]

3 April 2005:

AIDS Fighters Face a Resistant Form of Apathy
Where have all the condoms gone? Don't try looking at the Monster, the Hangar, Starlight or Barracuda. On a recent evening, these and more than a dozen other Manhattan gay bars were well stocked with free going-out guides, but not a scrap of literature about H.I.V. prevention or the perils of crystal meth. As for condoms, the frontline defense against sexually transmitted diseases, only one establishment stocked them - behind the bar. [More - NY Times]

As West Nile Claims Another Life, State Plans Offensive
A 53-year-old Glenn County man has died after a six-month battle with West Nile virus, the second human fatality attributed to the virus in Northern California and the 28th statewide since July, health officials said. [More - LA Times]

2 April 2005:

Marburg virus disease in Angola - 140 cases, 132 fatal
As of 31 March, 140 cases of Marburg virus disease have been reported in Angola. Of these, 132 have been fatal. Cases continue to be concentrated in Uige. [More - Medical News Today]

Second case of CWD confirmed
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Chronic wasting disease was discovered in a second captive deer in central New York, days after the deadly malady was first detected in the state, agricultural officials said Saturday. Both white-tailed deer had been part of captive herds in Oneida County, east of Syracuse. The second positive case was discovered in a small herd that had taken in animals from the herd that yielded the initial confirmed case earlier this week, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets. [More - Newsday]

Dana Point's Baby Beach Is in Need of a Change
Pamela Denayer remembers a time when Baby Beach's calm waters seemed perfect for her three children. But about two years ago, she began noticing signs warning of high bacteria counts in the water. "We go kayaking now," the 42-year-old mother said. "I don't let my kids go in the water." In recent years, the stretch of beach just inside Dana Point Harbor with calm, inviting waters has become synonymous with bacterial pollution and has been on a state "most polluted" beach list. [More - LA Times]

Bush Authorizes Use of Quarantine Powers in Cases of Bird Flu
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the government to impose a quarantine to deal with any outbreak of a particularly lethal variation of influenza now found in Southeast Asia. The order is intended to deal with a type of influenza commonly referred to as bird flu. Since January 2004, an estimated 69 people, primarily in Vietnam, have contracted the disease. But Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a flu expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, has said he suspects there are more cases. [More - NY Times]

Petting Zoos Scrutinized Over E. Coli
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- Shannon Smowton's trip to the fair should have ended with happy memories of carnival rides and cute farm animals. Instead, the 5-year-old is clinging to life, her kidneys under attack from the E. coli infection she apparently caught at the fair. Shannon is among at least 22 people, almost all children, who fell seriously ill after visiting one of three fairs in Florida in the past two months. State health officials are investigating 35 more cases. At the Central Florida Fair in Orlando, the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City and the Florida State Fair in Tampa, the victims may have had different things to eat and drink, but almost all of them touched the chicks, sheep, goats and calves in the petting zoos. [More - NY Times]

1 April 2005:

Brain Disease Found in Deer in New York
A case of chronic wasting disease, which affects the brain and nervous system in deer and elk, has been detected for the first time in New York, according to the State Department of Agriculture and Markets. [More - NY Times]

Cholera Epidemic Breaks Out at Congo Camp
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) -- A cholera epidemic has killed at least four and infected dozens in a squalid camp for displaced people in northeastern Congo, and it threatens to spread across the entire region, U.N. officials said Friday. [More - NY Times]

In Florida, Petting Zoos Close Amid New Reports of Infections
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Two Florida petting zoos with farm animals voluntarily shut down on Thursday as the number of cases of children hospitalized with a deadly strain of E. coli bacteria nearly doubled in the last two days. State health authorities suspect that 25 cases of illness - mostly in children - are linked to petting zoos at a strawberry festival in Plant City, the Central Florida Fair in Orlando and the Florida State Fair in Tampa. The bacteria strain, E. coli O157:H7, causes kidney failure. [More - NY Times]

Panel Warns That Defense Against Germ Attack Is Weak
WASHINGTON, March 31 - Warning that the United States has escaped catastrophic biological attack largely by luck, the presidential commission on intelligence urged the American government on Thursday to intensify its efforts to block any biological assaults by terrorist groups or other countries. The recommendation, which was made in some of the most strident language found in the 601-page report, came even though the commission, like others before it, confirmed that the United States was wrong in its assertion that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons before the start of the war with Iraq in 2003. [More - Ny Times]

31 March 2005:

Drug Shows Promise Against Chagas' Disease
An experimental drug has shown promise as the first effective therapy for Chagas' disease, a widespread affliction in Latin America that kills 50,000 people annually, scientists reported Wednesday. The antifungal agent TAK-187 was effective in the treatment of infected mice and didn't cause the toxic side effects of existing drugs, according to a study in the April issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The researchers said they intended to begin human trials of the drug as soon as possible. [More - LA Times]

Florida Derby Is on Bacteria Alert
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. -- Although trainer Nick Zito is running the top two morning-line choices for the Florida Derby, no one is suggesting that he has a stranglehold on Saturday's $1-million race. Stranglehold: These days that's a poor word choice -- and a bad pun, probably --in South Florida, where Gulfstream Park, host of the Florida Derby, and its nearby training facility, Palm Meadows, are on an alert for "strangles," a contagious bacterial disease that is marked by nasal inflammation and mouth abscesses and that has tracks in Kentucky and New York equally concerned. [More - LA Times]

Bird Flu Hits N. Korea in Sore Spot
SEOUL -- In recent years, North Korea's Kim Jong Il ordered his army to build chicken farms to fight the country's chronic food shortage and sell poultry abroad for hard currency. Just this month, North Korean-raised chickens were due to be exported for the first time -- to South Korea. For that reason, the first reported outbreak of avian flu in North Korea could have a devastating effect on the secretive, impoverished country. In a rare moment of candor Sunday, the regime in Pyongyang confirmed rumors in the South Korean media that it was battling an epidemic of the deadly virus. Its official news agency said the flu had broken out at "a few chicken farms." No humans had been infected, it said, but in an effort to control the disease, "hundreds of thousands of chickens have been burned." [More - LA Times]

29 March 2005:

Japan May Ease Mad Cow Testing
TOKYO -- Japan's food safety panel on Monday recommended that the government stop testing cattle younger than 21 months for mad cow disease, a step toward making U.S. beef eligible for import after a 15-month ban. [More - NY Times]

Link to Petting Zoo Studied in Girl's Death
A girl's death is being investigated for a possible connection to an outbreak of E. coli bacterial infections among people who attended fairs that included petting zoos, the state's top health official said in Tallahassee. Florida Health Secretary John Agwunobi said there were 14 confirmed cases of people becoming ill after attending the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City or the Central Florida Fair in Orlando. [More - LA Times]

Chicken Farmers Positive for Bird Flu
DANANG, Vietnam -- Five members of a family that ran a chicken farm in northern Vietnam have tested positive for bird flu, health officials said Tuesday. Initial tests showed the H5N1 virus was present in samples taken from a 35-year-old man, his 32-year-old wife and their three daughters, said Nguyen Van Vy, director of Haiphong Health Department. [More - LA Times]

28 March 2005:

Bird Flu Outbreak Reported for First Time
North Korea acknowledged an outbreak of bird flu for the first time but said no humans had caught the disease. The North's official Korean Central News Agency reported that the outbreaks occurred at a "few chicken farms" and that "hundreds of thousands of infected chickens" were burned before burial. It said no farm workers were known to have been infected. [More - NY Times]

The effects of oral health on pregnany
Many women are already familiar with the negative effect pregnancy can have on the mouth -- the swollen and bloody gums caused by hormonal changes. As it turns out, the mouth may, in turn, have a negative effect on pregnancy. A study has found that certain bacteria from the mouth, specifically, those that cause root caries and some kinds of gum disease, may be related to early deliveries and low birth weight. [More - LA Times]

27 March 2005:

Officials Order Poultry Farms to Be Disinfected
Vietnam ordered health authorities to launch a nationwide campaign to clean up poultry farms in a bid to control the spread of bird flu as the number of human cases continued to grow, state media reported. The Ministry of Health issued instructions that all poultry farms in the country, from large-scale commercial operations to backyard farms, would be disinfected beginning Friday, the Laborer newspaper reported. [More - NY Times]

26 March 2005:

Florida Officials Seek a Link in 15 Cases of a Kidney Illness
Fifteen people in Florida who visited agricultural fairs recently have developed a life-threatening kidney disease or are infected with bacteria that can cause it, Florida health officials said yesterday. Eleven of those affected are children, and petting zoos at the two fairs are suspected, but Florida's secretary of health said it was "too early to point to one single element, such as a petting zoo." Epidemiologists are "trying to triangulate the 15 cases and see if they can be associated with a single point source," the secretary, Dr. John O. Agwunobi, said. [More - NY Times]

17-Year-Old Girl Dies of Avian Flu in Vietnam
A 17-year-old girl in northern Vietnam has died of avian influenza, the 48th official bird flu fatality in Southeast Asia since outbreaks began 18 months ago, local authorities said Friday. The girl's death followed an announcement a day earlier by Cambodian health officials that a 26-year-old man there had died of the disease, the country's second fatality. [More - NY Times]

Human Tests of Avian Flu Vaccine Underway
U.S. health officials said Wednesday they had started human tests of a vaccine against avian flu. The vaccine, made by Sanofi Pasteur, will be tested in 450 healthy adults in Rochester, N.Y.; Baltimore; and Los Angeles, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported. The vaccine is made from an inactivated H5N1 avian flu virus isolated in 2004. The early study is to test the vaccine's safety, not whether it protects against the infection. [More - NY Times]

25 March 2005:

Kidney Disease Outbreak in Florida Linked to Fairs
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Two more children have been stricken with life-threatening kidney infections after visiting petting zoos at fairs, bringing the total hospitalized in central Florida to nine, officials said Thursday. There were fears the number of children suffering from the rare disease -- hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS -- would continue to grow. Beyond those hospitalized, two children and an adult showing symptoms of HUS were under observation, said Dr. Mehul Dixit, who is treating some of the children at Florida Hospital Orlando. [More - LA Times]

New Vaccine Said to Offer Hope Against Bacterium
A new vaccine tested in West Africa could save the lives of thousands of poor rural children who die each year from bacterial infections, a team of scientists reported yesterday. The vaccine is a strengthened version of Prevnar, which has been given widely to American infants since 2000 and prevents rare but serious infections with the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium. [More - NYTimes]

24 March 2005:

Virus New to Angola Kills 95; Travelers Told to Avoid North
JOHANNESBURG - Health officials urged travelers on Wednesday to avoid Uíge Province, in northern Angola, after the World Health Organization identified the Marburg virus as the source of an epidemic that has killed at least 95 Angolans since October. [More - NY Times]

World TB Day aimed at raising awareness
Progress is being made to keep the incidence of the worldwide disease tuberculosis at relatively low levels in the Inland Valley. Today is world Tuberculosis Day, to draw attention to the disease and efforts to keep it under control. [More - Daily Bulletin] See also - World TB website and WHO News Release on TB in Africa

Winner design for National AIDS Memorial picked
SAN FRANCISCO - A haunting design by two New York architects won a competition to create a centerpiece for the National AIDS Memorial Grove, a seven-acre garden in Golden Gate Park that is the only federally recognized AIDS memorial in the United States, contest officials announced Wednesday. [More - Daily Bulletin]

23 March 2005:

U.N.: War on TB Succeeding in Most Places
LONDON (AP) -- Most areas of the world seem to be winning the battle against tuberculosis, but an overwhelming burden of cases in Africa, unleashed by HIV, is frustrating efforts to reverse the global epidemic, according to a new U.N. report. Major progress has been made against TB in hard-hit Asia in the last year, but in Africa infection rates have tripled in the last decade and worldwide infection rates are still on the rise, according to estimates in the World Health Organization's annual tuberculosis report. [More - NY Times]

China Province to Test Workers for AIDS
SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China's southwestern province of Yunnan will require annual AIDS tests for people working in hotels, nightclubs and other entertainment outlets, a local official and the government's Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday. Under the new rules, announced Monday and effective immediately, those testing positive will be fired, Xinhua said, citing the text of the regulation. [More - NY Times]

Bird Flu Suspected in Cambodian's Death
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) -- A man from southwestern Cambodia is suspected to have died from bird flu, the health minister said Thursday. The man died at a hospital in the capital, Phnom Penh, late Tuesday after he fell ill early this week, Health Minister Nuth Sokhom said. The man would be the country's second victim of the disease, which has killed a total of 46 people from Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia since it began ravaging poultry farms across Asia in December 2003. [More - NY Times]

Millions Gave Up Flu Shots for Others
WASHINGTON -- Some 16 to 17 million Americans voluntarily gave up their flu shot this past winter, so that the sick, the elderly and health care workers were protected nearly as much as in years past, government officials said Tuesday. [More - NY Times]

22 March 2005:

Rubella Wiped Out in the U.S.
WASHINGTON -- Rubella, a virus known to cause birth defects, miscarriages and stillbirths, has been eliminated in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Monday. "This is an achievement -- but the story is not done yet," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC in Atlanta. "There are still parts of the world where immunization is not common or not common enough to prevent children from developing congenital rubella." [More - LA Times]

Defending against West Nile virus
The torrential rains that drenched Southern California over the last few months have triggered an early outbreak of West Nile virus. Disease-carrying mosquitoes have begun to breed in stagnant pools of water left behind by the storms, and the virus has surfaced two months earlier than last year, when 829 people in the state contracted the disease. [More - LA Times | Graphic (pdf)]

Battling Insects, Parasites and Politics
SOMJI, Nigeria - The reason for all the excitement, one public health doctor after another trooping into her mud-walled room to have a look, was that Patience Solomon had correctly hung her new royal blue mosquito net over the bed she shared with her 2-year-old son, James. [More - NY Times]

TB Declines, but Not in Immigrants
Tuberculosis rates in the United States reached an all-time low in 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week. But they rose in 17 states, and states with large numbers of recent immigrants, including New York, New Jersey, Florida and California, accounted for most new cases. [More - NY Times]

21 March 2005:

Those luxury spa pedicures can have an ugly downside
Sheila Cook settles back in the stuffed leather chair and wiggles her toes in the attached whirlpool basin, bubbling with warm water. As a bank manager who regularly logs a 12-hour day, much of it on her feet, her biweekly spa pedicure is part luxury, part necessity. "If I don't get my pedicure, I am cranky," said Cook, 52, of Shadow Hills. She's surrounded by five other throne-like chairs at Unique Hair, Nails & Spa in Eagle Rock, where owners Ray Nguyen and Jennifer Vu, like other salon operators, say the demand for spa pedicures is up. More luxurious than pedicures given in traditional portable foot baths, spa pedicures are performed in whirlpool basins and cost a few dollars more. At Unique, a regular pedicure is $12 and a spa pedicure, $16. But this extra pampering may come at a price. Since November, two Northern California counties have reported outbreaks of bacterial skin infections associated with pedicures. Public health officials in Orange County have received sporadic reports of similar infections and plan to alert doctors there to watch for pedicure-associated infections. [More - LA Times]

20 March 2005:

Sex Vows Did Not Curb STDs
Young adults who as teenagers took pledges not to have sex until marriage were just as likely to contract a venereal disease as people who didn't make the promise, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Sociologists studied data from a government-funded study that tested 11,000 18- to 24-year-olds for some sexually transmitted diseases, including chlamydia and gonorrhea. [More - LA Times]

African Artists Raise Voices Against Malaria
AKAR, Senegal - As far as causes go, malaria may well be the least trendy. Luckily, when more than a dozen African musical superstars converged on this coastal capital to strut their stuff against the disease, Africa's most persistent scourge, the organizers thought to invite the singer Corneille. [More - NY Times]

19 March 2005:

U.S. Tuberculosis Rate Hits Lowest on Record
The tuberculosis infection rate in the United States fell to a record low last year -- the lowest since reporting began 52 years ago -- but the relatively small decline raised fears that the nation was falling behind in its battle to eliminate the disease. [More - LA Times]

Measles Kills Hundreds Despite Vaccine Efforts
Hundreds of children have died in an upsurge in measles cases in Nigeria, despite a series of local vaccination campaigns aimed at combating the disease. At least 589 children have died of measles so far this year in Nigeria, which, along with India and Pakistan, is one of the countries most affected by the disease. [More - LA Times]

18 March 2005:

5-Year-Old Boy Tests Positive for Bird Flu
A 5-year-old boy from central Vietnam has become the latest person to contract the bird flu virus that has killed 46 people in the region, health officials said today. [More - LA Times]

China's Vice Premier Urges Businesses to Help With AIDS Fight
BEIJING, March 18 -Vice Premier Wu Yi of China today urged domestic and international businesses to join in fighting AIDS, the latest step in the government's increasingly open and aggressive efforts to combat the deadly virus. Ms. Wu, who also serves as health minister, said the battle cannot be won by the government alone. Companies should help their employees get tested and treated, she said. [More - NY Times]

16 March 2005:

Many Scientists Fear Bird Flu Cases Exceed Data
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- After more than a year of watching patients sicken and die of bird flu, Dr. Tran Tinh Hien of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases here thought he understood the illness. Then last month, he learned of an unsettling study. Japanese researchers retested samples from 30 Vietnamese patients whose lab tests showed no signs of the disease. They discovered that seven had actually been infected. [More - NY Times]

After 2-Day Scare, Tests Show No Anthrax at Mail Facilities
WASHINGTON -- A two-day anthrax scare that disrupted federal mail and prompted 700 Pentagon workers to take antibiotics ended Tuesday when federal officials said traces of a material detected by a Pentagon mail screening device apparently were not the deadly substance. [More - NY Times]

15 March 2005:

Initial Pentagon Test Is Positive for Anthrax
Samples taken at a Pentagon mail facility were positive for anthrax in preliminary overnight tests, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services reported today. But officials do not yet know definitively if anthrax bacteria are present or, if they are, whether they could have transmitted disease. [More - Washington Post]

True Toll of Avian Flu Remains a Mystery
hile early reports of the deadliness of human avian influenza suggested that about 90 percent of the victims died, there are growing signs that the disease's true death rate is much lower - although still high enough to kill many millions of people if the worst fears about its spread come to fruition. [More - NY Times]

14 March 2005:

Horse shots harness West Nile
Cheryl Beintema of Covina keeps her show horses on a strict schedule of inoculations. At Santa Anita Park recently, veterinarian Kurt Hoffman walked from stall to stall sticking a long needle into the necks of thoroughbreds worth thousands of dollars. Margorie Heintz of La Habra Heights vaccinated horses Shoshone and Chief, and her mule, Bella. She is taking no chances Heintz is inoculating early. Local horse owners, stables and race track veterinarians have been spurred into early action by recent rains to prevent West Nile virus from sickening their horses. [More - Daily Bulletin]

13 March 2005:

Avian flu risk low for tourists, but experts fear virus mutation
As temperatures remain cool in Asian countries, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta predicts more outbreaks of avian, or bird, flu among poultry there. Although the current outbreak is not considered risky for most tourists, epidemiologists are worried the viruses could mutate and acquire the ability to spread efficiently from person to person. [More - LA Times]

11 March 2005:

Upland man lobbies for West Nile funding
SACRAMENTO -- Jack Raney, of Upland, traveled to Sacramento on Thursday to put a human face on the toll West Nile virus took on California last year. He joined a state senator who called on the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to appropriate $300 million to fight the disease this year. [More - Daily Bulletin]

10 March 2005:

West Nile virus in Ontario
CHINO -- Mosquitoes captured in south Ontario have tested positive for West Nile virus, providing more evidence the potentially deadly disease is active and spreading for a second year in the Inland Valley, vector control officials announced Wednesday. [More - Daily Bulletin]

9 March 2005:

Counties arm to fight bird flu
The threat of Asian bird flu becoming a global pandemic in humans has prompted local health officials to develop strategies to combat the highly lethal influenza virus. Public health workers in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties have been weighing plans that include stockpiling antiviral medicines, arranging for more hospital beds and acquiring additional medical equipment. [More - Daily Bulletin]

8 March 2005:

4 New Human Cases of Avian Flu Are Reported in Vietnam
Vietnam has reported four new cases of human avian influenza, including those of a 21-year-old man and his 14-year-old sister, the World Health Organization said yesterday. The health agency said that the man died but that it did not know the status of his sister and the two other people affected. All four became ill in early or mid-February. Vietnamese officials also are trying to determine whether a 26-year-old nurse admitted to a hospital in Hanoi last week developed avian influenza. [More - NY Times]

Take precautions to help control West Nile virus
We had hoped it would be spring before we had to echo last summer's calls for public and governmental responsibility regarding the West Nile virus. But as the first mosquitoes have tested positive for the virus in Orange County, it's clear nature has other plans. The early emergence of West Nile among mosquitoes, about two months earlier than last year, doesn't necessarily mean that the coming summer will be worse than the last, experts say, although the recent heavy rains could increase disease-carrying mosquito populations. But there's no question that the West Nile season will be longer. [More - Daily Bulletin]

7 March 2005:

Doctor Contrarian
A pregnant mother from Topanga Canyon has brought her toddler son to Dr. Jay Gordon for a checkup. Her son received all the recommended vaccinations, but she wonders aloud if she should do the same for her second child, who is due in a few months. It's a topic about which Gordon is passionate. Parents from around Southern California choose Gordon for his outspoken and controversial stance on vaccinations, driving from as far away as Santa Barbara and Long Beach. [More - LA Times]

6 March 2005:

Upland man still battling disease
UPLAND -- The brush with death seems like yesterday for Jack Raney. In fact, it's been seven months since West Nile virus ravaged his brain and left the 46-year-old Upland man permanently disabled. [More - Daily Bulletin]

Wet winter raises threat of outbreak
Experts may have been right when they said this year's West Nile virus season might be worse, if not longer, than 2004. And at the time, rain wasn't in the picture. [More - Daily Bulletin]

5 March 2005:

After all that ... milder flu season
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- After all the panic last fall over the vaccine shortage, the flu season is turning out to be milder than last year's severe bout, but it may not have peaked yet, the government said Thursday. [More - CNN]

A U.N. Report Takes a Hard Look at Fighting AIDS in Africa
Billions more dollars will be needed to curb the spread of AIDS in Africa, but as countries increase their donations, the amounts will be less important than how well they are spent and in what context, a new report from the United Nations AIDS program said yesterday. Pouring more money into programs to combat AIDS could do more harm than good unless they are effectively coordinated, the report, "AIDS in Africa," said. [More - NY Times]

2 March 2005:

Rains Are a Boost for West Nile Virus: It's Here Earlier, Poses a Greater Risk
This winter's record rains have created prime breeding conditions for mosquitoes, prompting health officials to warn of a potentially serious outbreak this year of the deadly West Nile virus that killed 27 people in the state last year. [More - LA Times]

Chiron Is Free to Resume Making Flu Vaccine
Chiron Corporation has received permission to resume production at a British factory that was shut down five months ago, a development that should help avert a shortage of flu vaccine in the United States next winter. British regulators lifted their suspension of Chiron's manufacturing license today, saying the company had made "satisfactory progress" in rectifying sanitary and quality-control problems. [More - NY Times]

28 February 2005:

'Chicken Flu' Is No Big Peril
It's been a frightening year for flu. First came the dire predictions out of Southeast Asia, where the explosive spread of H5N1 avian flu among chickens, along with the deaths of about 40 people, has spawned fears that the disease could mutate and cause a worldwide pandemic. Next, there was the flu vaccine shortage. But so far, the flu season has been milder than usual. Gradually, the flu panic has subsided. [More - LA Times]

Man, 69, Is Nation's 14th Fatality From Bird Flu
Vietnamese officials said a 69-year-old man had died from bird flu, the 14th fatality from the disease this year. The victim's relatives reported that his whole family had eaten chicken during Lunar New Year festivities this month, said Pham Van Diu,head of the Thai Binh Provincial Preventive Medicine Center. [More - LA Times]

Germs are working overtime at the office
With more and more workers gulping down coffee and lunch -- sometimes even dinner -- at their keyboards, tens of thousands of germs can be found in nearly every corner of the office. They are lurking beneath the papers and files, on top of keyboards and computer mice and on telephones. One study found that the office desk has more bacteria on it than the average toilet. [More - LA Times]

27 February 2005:

An Arsenal of Sanitizers for a Nation of Germophobes
"THE AVIATOR," Martin Scorsese's biography of the filmmaker, aviation genius and billionaire Howard Hughes, may, er, clean up at the Academy Awards tonight. The movie has 11 Oscar nominations, including one for best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, who portrays Hughes as he battles Pan Am, the federal government and, more ominously, an army of germs that are both invisible and ubiquitous. [More - NY Times]

Keep unwelcome norovirus stowaway from joining the cruise
In January alone, five cruise-ship sailings experienced outbreaks of gastrointestinal illnesses linked to noroviruses, a group that causes acute bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Symptoms generally subside in a day or two. [More - LA Times]

26 February 2005:

Two New Viruses Reported Belonging to AIDS Family
BOSTON, Feb. 25 - American scientists said Friday that they had discovered two new human viruses in Africa that belong to the same family, retroviruses, as the virus that causes AIDS. So far, the scientists said, the new viruses have not been linked to any disease, but they are being monitored out of concern that they or similar retroviruses might conceivably spawn another epidemic. [More - NY Times]

HIV Rate Doubles Over Decade for Blacks in U.S.
The HIV infection rate has doubled among blacks in the United States over a decade while holding steady among whites -- evidence of a widening racial gap in the epidemic, researchers said in Boston. [More - LA Times]

25 February 2005:

Study: Drug cocktail could reduce mother-to-baby AIDS
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Scientists fighting the ravages of AIDS in the Third World have shown convincingly that a short and relatively inexpensive combination of HIV drugs could reduce mother-to-baby transmission rates in Africa far more effectively than the single pill now used. [More - CNN]

New York AIDS case puzzles top experts
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- AIDS experts who created an uproar when they publicized the case of a man infected with an apparently uniquely dangerous mutant of HIV said on Thursday it was important to warn health officials. [More - CNN]

Massive Africa anti-polio effort begins
DALOA, Ivory Coast (AP) -- Health workers launched a massive Africa-wide polio vaccination campaign on Friday as the United Nations announced the crippling disease has spread into yet another country, dimming hopes for success of a global campaign aimed at stamping out the malady this year. [More - CNN]

24 February 2005:

Poultry Farming Reform Urged to Curb Bird Flu
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- As Vietnam reported 27 new outbreaks of bird flu, public health officials meeting here called for a massive transformation in poultry farming throughout Southeast Asia to stem the epidemic. The biggest challenge will be to reform the practices of millions of subsistence farmers who share living space with their chickens, ducks and other animals. Scientists said such conditions created a hothouse for mutations in the flu virus that eventually could enable it to pass easily between people, a precondition for a possible pandemic. [More - LA Times]

U.S. to test bird flu vaccine
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government is getting ready to test a bird flu vaccine and preparing to stockpile both vaccine and antiviral drugs as the threat grows that a deadly strain of avian influenza will begin spreading from Asia. [More - CNN]

Study: Condoms keep AIDS in check in Uganda
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Programs that promote abstinence and monogamy to combat AIDS are failing in a landmark Ugandan study, and only condom use has kept the deadly virus in check, researchers reported on Wednesday. [More - CNN]

23 February 2005:

New HIV clue may help find vaccine
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Scientists said they have discovered a key clue to how HIV mutates to evade the immune system -- a finding that could advance the search for new drugs and a vaccine. [More - CNN]

22 February 2005:

World 'not ready for germ threat'
LONDON, England (Reuters) -- The threat of a biological terrorist strike by al Qaeda is very real, but the world is still not prepared, the head of international crime fighting agency Interpol says. [More - CNN]

Scientists Explore Meth's Role in Immune System
Reports that a New York man may be carrying a rare and possibly virulent strain of H.I.V. have focused new attention on the biological relationship between the virus and methamphetamine, a drug that has become increasingly entwined in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in cities from San Francisco to Miami to New York. [More - NY Times]

A Deadly Fever, Once Defeated, Lurks in a Chinese Lake
XINMIN VILLAGE, China -- Had she been younger, Liao Cuiying might have been mistaken for pregnant, standing beside a watery ditch with a hard, distended belly that spoke not of imminent life but approaching death. Her village is surrounded by Dongting Lake, an immense inkblot of brown water that sustains villages of fishermen and farmers. Mrs. Liao, 55, had regularly washed her vegetables in a nearby stream and cut wood in the damp soil beside the lake. They were mundane, daily tasks that would cost Mrs. Liao her life, because Dongting Lake carries a complicated burden for those who depend on it: people cannot touch the water. It is infested with a water borne parasite called schistosomiasis, also known as snail fever, which can penetrate a person's skin after only 10 seconds of contact and cause serious illness, even death. [More - NY Times]

21 February 2005:

School nurses want more terror preparation
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Long associated with treating playground scrapes and tummy aches, school nurses nationwide say they need to be more prepared for emergencies such as terrorist attacks. [More - Boston Globe]

Nearly forgotten, toxic shock may be on the rise
Toxic shock syndrome linked to tampon use, which made headlines 25 years ago when the dangerous illness sickened thousands of U.S. women and killed dozens, may be reemerging as a public health threat, according to physicians and other experts. [More - LA Times]

Rapid HIV test slow to catch on with doctors
When a rapid HIV test came on the market two years ago, prevention experts quickly predicted that it would become an important weapon in the fight against AIDS. The 20-minute test would encourage more people to find out their status and get treatment, reducing their chances of spreading the disease, health officials said. Research has shown that people who realize they are HIV positive reduce risky behaviors by up to 70%. But the test hasn't lived up to its potential, because -- so far -- most physicians don't offer it. [More - LA Times]

CDC Chief: Bird Flu Could Become Epidemic
WASHINGTON -- The Earth may be on the brink of a worldwide epidemic from a bird flu virus that may mutate to become as deadly and infectious as viruses that killed millions during three influenza pandemics of the 20th century, a federal health official said Monday. [More - LA Times]

Man Dies After Getting Tainted Kidney
BERLIN -- A man who received a kidney from a woman who was infected with rabies died Monday, a German hospital said, the second death of a patient who got one of the donor's organs. [More - LA Times]

Pregnancy peril from cats is exaggerated
The woman called with a bittersweet announcement. The good news: She was pregnant. The bad news: She was returning the kitten she had bought from Joan Bernstein, who breeds Tonkinese cats in Center Moriches, N.Y. Along with admonitions to avoid alcohol and hot tubs, pregnant women are always warned about contact with cats, because of the concern that feline feces can transmit toxoplasmosis. [More - LA Times]

AIDS Vaccine Research Funds Getting Scarce
WASHINGTON -- U.S. funding for AIDS vaccine research is tightening, the government's top HIV expert warned Monday, even as he said scientists still must overcome a big hurdle in the hunt: how to harness the body's first defenders to repel infection. [More - LA Times]

Alarm Over Single AIDS Case Is Challenged by Questioners
New York City's health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, had barely stepped away from the microphone on Feb. 11 after announcing the discovery of a possibly new and deadly H.I.V. strain when the storm started. More than a week later, it has not abated. One group of scientists not involved in the research was quick to dismiss the news as isolated to one man and unworthy of alarm. Other scientists said not enough research had been done to warrant a public health announcement, and accused Dr. Frieden of excessive haste. [More - NY Times]

20 February 2005:

Gloves may not keep germs from food
It's reassuring to watch restaurant workers handle our food with gleaming gloves, but the appearance of extra cleanliness may be no more than that -- appearance. That's what Oklahoma scientists suggest after studying hundreds of fast-food tortillas purchased in Oklahoma and Kansas. [More - LA Times]

19 February 2005:

U.S. OKs Drug to Fight Smallpox Shot Reactions
Computer Sciences Corp. won U.S. regulatory approval of a treatment for people who develop rare, dangerous reactions to the smallpox vaccination. People with weakened immune systems or other skin problems can develop infections from the smallpox inoculation because it contains a live virus. El Segundo-based Computer Sciences' product, called Vaccinia Immune Globulin Intravenous, or VIGIV, contains antibodies to fight such reactions, the Food and Drug Administration said. [More - LA Times]

18 February 2005:

Plague Kills Scores in Congo Outbreak
KINSHASA, Congo -- A rare form of plague has killed at least 61 people at a diamond mine in the remote wilds of northeast Congo, and authorities fear hundreds more who fled into the forests to escape the contagion are infected and dying, the World Health Organization said Friday [More - LA Times]

AIDS Blamed as South Africa's Mortality Rate Soars
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 18 -- In an implicit but devastating account of the havoc AIDS is causing here, South Africa's government reported today that annual deaths increased 57 percent from 1997 to 2003, with common AIDS-related diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia fueling much of the rise. [More - LA Times]

17 February 2005:

Study: Partner Treatment Works for STDs
SEATTLE -- People with chlamydia or gonorrhea are supposed to tell past sexual partners about their diagnosis and urge them to get treatment. A new study says giving the patients medicine to pass on to their possibly infected sexual partners works even better. [More - LA Times]

Number of reported AIDS cases increases sharply in S. Florida
New AIDS cases in Florida leaped by a surprising 24 percent last year, fueled by a growing failure of drug cocktails and an increase in patients who didn't know they were infected until they got sick, health officials said. [More - LA Times]

Vietnam Expands Poultry Ban to Curb Spread of Bird Flu
Vietnamese officials Wednesday ordered all chickens be slaughtered or removed from Ho Chi Minh City and banned the raising of poultry there through this year in an effort to quell the latest outbreak of bird flu. [More - LA Times]

16 February 2005:

H.I.V. Strain Adds Urgency to Changes in City AIDS Program
Acting with added urgency after a rare and possibly virulent strain of H.I.V. was detected last week in New York, the city's health department is reorganizing its AIDS program to encourage more aggressive collection of crucial information about the treatment and the spread of the disease, the department's commissioner said yesterday. The commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said that the department had too little information to deal with the growing problem of H.I.V. resistance to drug treatment. [More - NY Times]

COMMENTARY: The Case of the Mutant AIDS Virus
Was New York right to sound the alarm? You bet.
By Laurie Garrett
On Friday, New York City health officials issued this chilling announcement: A man is infected with a form of the AIDS virus that is not only resistant to three of the four classes of anti-HIV drugs, it is apparently so virulent that it causes full-blown AIDS in a matter of weeks rather than the usual decade or more. It will be super-difficult to treat, and it may be a super-fast killer. [More - LA Times]

Experts Divided on Implications of N.Y. AIDS Case
As New York City public health officials Tuesday attempted to track down the sexual contacts of a man with what has been termed a "super-strain" of HIV, other AIDS experts questioned why such an uproar has emerged over a single case. [More - LA Times]

15 February 2005:

Gays Debate Radical Steps to Curb Unsafe Sex
After all the thousands of AIDS deaths and all the years of "Safe Sex Is Hot Sex" prevention messages, it has come down to this: many gay men who know the rules of engagement in the age of AIDS are not using condoms. As news of a potentially virulent strain of H.I.V. settles in, gay activists and AIDS prevention workers say they are dismayed and angry that the 25-year-old battle against the disease might have to begin all over again. [More - NY Times]

How to Get Those at Risk to Avoid Risky Sex?
If nothing else, the AIDS case that alarmed health officials in New York last week illustrates the enormous difficulty of promoting and sustaining changes in sexual behavior, social scientists say. The man at the center of the furor, who officials fear may carry a rare and possibly virulent strain of H.I.V., reportedly engaged in unprotected sex with hundreds of partners in recent months and took the drug crystal methamphetamine. [More - NY Times]

Staph Cases an 'Emerging Epidemic'
A painful and virulent skin infection that has plagued Los Angeles County jail inmates is now appearing with increasing frequency throughout Southern California. Public health officials across the region are warning family doctors and hospitals to be on the lookout for the infection, caused by a new form of Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as staph. The infection -- easily misdiagnosed and resistant to antibiotics commonly used to treat skin infections -- causes a skin reaction, usually in the form of lesions or small boils that, if left untreated, can become as large as a softball. [More - LA Times]

Flu Shots Found Less Useful for Elderly
Vaccinating the elderly against influenza is not as effective as researchers had previously believed, government researchers reported Monday. Although previous studies have suggested that flu shots reduce mortality among the elderly by 50% to 80%, a new study of three decades of mortality data indicates that widespread use of the vaccine has not been nearly that effective, and may not have reduced deaths among the elderly at all. [More - LA Times]

14 February 2005:

Search for Origin of New AIDS Strain Widens
AIDS viruses isolated from two people are being studied to determine whether either might be the source of a rare and potentially more aggressive form of H.I.V. detected in a New York City man, an AIDS scientist involved in the studies said yesterday. Many more tests need to be conducted to determine if the strains from the three people are the same, said the scientist, Dr. David Ho. He directs the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan, which is conducting some of the studies in collaboration with the New York City health department. While some findings may be available in a week, others will take longer, Dr. Ho said in an interview. [More - NY Times]

Gay Users of Internet Play Down Concerns Over New Strain of AIDS
Alerts popped like flashbulbs all over the Web this weekend as news of a rare and potentially more aggressive form of H.I.V., first reported publicly in New York on Friday, spread through gay chat rooms, Web logs, dating sites and e-mail. Officials said the H.I.V. strain had been detected in an unidentified man who, while using crystal methamphetamine, had engaged in unprotected anal sex with multiple partners. Gay users of the Web, especially those who initiate sexual encounters online, had ample reason for concern: the man had apparently met some of those partners on an unnamed Web site. And yet, while a touch of anger and fear could be found among the Web's textual din, some of the most popular gay dating and discussion sites buzzed with the usual banter of love and lust, with many of those online advising against panic. [More - NY Times]

Sonja Buckley, 86, Scientist, Is Dead; Helped Identify Lassa Virus
Dr. Sonja Buckley, a Yale virologist and investigator who helped in 1970 to identify the Lassa virus, a potentially deadly disease that originated in Africa, died on Feb. 2 in Baltimore. She was 86. [More - NY Times]

13 February 2005:

Scientists Urge More Study On a Rare Strain of H.I.V.
On the day following the announcement that a rare strain of the AIDS virus was found in a New York City man, scientists said much work needed to be done to assess just how dangerous the virus is. In particular, experts said, it needed to be seen whether the same virus could be transmitted as easily to other men, whether it would destroy their immune system as quickly and prove as resistant to anti-retroviral drugs as it did in the New York man. [More - NY Times]

12 February 2005:

Rare Strain of H.I.V. Raises Fear of a Resurgence in AIDS Cases
An old fear returned yesterday to those fighting the spread of AIDS among gay men: fear itself. For a decade, AIDS educators and activists have been fighting the growing complacency among gay men about the risks of unprotected sex, complacency fueled by medications that have drastically reduced the death rate of those infected; by the use of the Internet to enable casual sex; by the growing popularity of inhibition-lowering recreational drugs; and by the sheer emotional fatigue of those who had grown tired of confronting death. But yesterday's announcement that a New York City man had contracted - and possibly spread - a deadly rare strain of fast-developing and drug-resistant H.I.V. may have the potential to change perceptions yet again. [More - NY Times]

Rare and Aggressive H.I.V. Reported in New York
A rare strain of H.I.V. that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS was detected in a New York City man last week, city health officials announced on Friday [More - NY Times]

Chilled by Findings, Investigators Dreaded the Mounting Evidence
Word that an especially menacing form of H.I.V. might have appeared in New York set the city's public health machinery into motion last month on parallel tracks, with scientists studying the virus, shoe-leather detectives tracking people who might have been exposed and officials wrestling with when to go public. Officials at the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene - along with private sector researchers, and state and federal officials - struggled to find the balance between aggressiveness in the face of a threat and fear that some misunderstood detail could provoke them into raising a false alarm. [More - NY Times]

Drug-Resistant, Fast-Progressing Strain of HIV Discovered
NEW YORK -- Doctors have discovered a man with a previously unseen strain of HIV that is resistant to three of the four types of antiviral drugs that combat the disease, and progresses from infection to full-blown AIDS in two or three months, the New York City health department said. [More - LA Times]

State Has Oddly Mild Flu Season
The flu season in California appears to have peaked without a major outbreak despite the fact that thousands of doses of the flu vaccine remain unused. Health officials had feared that the flu season would be harsher than normal because of a nationwide shortage of flu vaccine. Although the shortage initially led to long lines at drug stores and clinics distributing the vaccine, California ended up by December with a surplus of flu shots and few takers. [More - LA Times]

11 February 2005:

Meningitis Shots Urged for Students
ATLANTA -- All college freshmen who live in dorms should be vaccinated for meningitis, a government panel recommended Thursday. The panel is also advising doctors to give the shot to all 11- and 12-year-old children and that it be provided to at least 4 million children eligible under the federal children's vaccines program. [More - LA Times]

CDC: 'Don't waste' flu vaccine
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not too late to get a flu shot if you can find one, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. [More - CNN]

More doctors suspended over bootleg Botox
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) -- Florida health officials Thursday moved to suspend the licenses of three more doctors in a widening investigation into the use of a dangerous Botox knockoff that has paralyzed at least four people. [More - CNN]

New Concern on Polio Among Mecca Pilgrims
A case of polio reached Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holy city, just before two million Muslims made the annual pilgrimage there last month, and World Health Organization officials now say the disease could spread to other countries, carried by returning pilgrims. [More - NY Times]

U.N. downplays fear of Saudi polio outbreak
GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- The U.N. health agency played down fears of a major polio outbreak in Saudi Arabia fueled by Islamic pilgrims from African nations still in the grip of the disease. Saudi authorities have reported three cases of polio, including one this week in a boy from Nigeria, where a vaccine boycott by hard-line Muslim clerics in the country's north spawned a resurgence of the disease across Africa, infecting children in formerly polio-free nations. [More - CNN]

Drug-resistant HIV strain alarms officials
(CNN) -- Health officials in New York City are alarmed after a man infected with a highly drug-resistant strain of HIV progressed to full-blown AIDS within months of diagnosis. [More - CNN]

10 February 2005:

Scientists Advise Screening All Adults for HIV Infection
All adult Americans should be screened for HIV infections in an effort to prolong lives and reduce new infections, two groups of researchers urged today. Everyone should be screened at least once, and the vast majority should be retested every three to five years in the same manner that physicians screen patients for colorectal cancer, diabetes, hypertension and other diseases, according to two independent reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine. [More - LA Times]

Officials Say Low Risk of TB Exposure Found
Nearly 2,000 people may have been exposed to tuberculosis at four hospitals, county health officials said Wednesday. The risk is considered "very low," but those people have been notified and urged to get tested for the disease, which is treatable with antibiotics. [More - LA Times]

U.S. to Keep Some Restrictions on Imports of Canadian Cattle
WASHINGTON -- The Agriculture Department will not allow meat from older cattle when it expands U.S. imports of Canadian beef March 7, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Wednesday. The United States had been planning on that date to reopen the border for the importing of meat from animals of any age and for the importing of live cattle younger than 30 months. [More - LA Times]

New flu strain found in state
SAN FRANCISCO -- The World Health Organization recommended Thursday that a new flu strain that emerged in Santa Clara County and two others be the target of next year's U.S. vaccine. [More - Daily Bulletin]

9 February 2005:

Prenatal Screening for Parasite Urged
CHICAGO -- A group of doctors is urging routine screenings for infections that can cause blindness and brain damage in babies and can be caused when pregnant women clean a cat litter box, gardens or eat raw eggs or meat. [More - Yahoo (AP)]

Periodontal Bacteria Linked to Heart Disease
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -- People who test positive for bacteria that cause periodontal disease also have increased thickness of the carotid artery, which suggests there is a direct relationship between periodontal infection and atherosclerosis, investigators report. [More - Reuters]

8 February 2005:

Proposed Funding Reductions Leave Nation Vulnerable to Public Health Emergencies Says ASTHO
USA -- Cuts in the Administration's proposed FY06 budget would weaken the ability of state and local public health to respond to bioterrorism, emerging infectious diseases, or other public health threats and emergencies warns the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). [More - Medical News Today]

'91 Memo Warned of Mercury in Shots
A memo from Merck & Co. shows that, nearly a decade before the first public disclosure, senior executives were concerned that infants were getting an elevated dose of mercury in vaccinations containing a widely used sterilizing agent. The March 1991 memo, obtained by The Times, said that 6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish. [More - LA Times]

7 February 2005:

City Weighs Plans to Deliver Medicine to Public After Attack
At the end of the first stage of a federal pilot program to determine how major cities could deliver medicine to thousands of people within 48 hours of a terrorist attack, New York is grappling with several proposals to achieve that goal. [More - NY Times]

India begins AIDS vaccine trials
NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- India, home to the world's second-largest HIV population after South Africa, began its first ever human trials of a new vaccine against the deadly virus on Monday, the health minister said. [More - CNN]

Vigilance with vaccines
The decision of some parents not to immunize their children raises the risk for everyone. If too many make the same choice, an outbreak of measles or mumps becomes possible. [More - LA Times]

6 February 2005:

Travelers to Exotic Climes carry Unpleasant Souvenirs
Kevin Keogh spent the morning doing ordinary chores. By afternoon, he was climbing out the window of his Mercedes and onto the roof as it sped down a busy street. Standing on top of the car, his arms outstretched as if he were surfing, he jumped to his death. What would make the chief financial officer for the city of Phoenix do something so bizarre? One theory is a parasite doctors believe he caught on a trip to Mexico several years earlier. The bug can live for years inside the body, travel to the brain and cause seizures and hallucinations -- symptoms Keogh started suffering a few months after his trip. [More - Star Tribune]

5 February 2005:

A Medical Mystery Man Bounces Back From Avian Flu
HANOI, Vietnam -- It started as a mild fever and severe chills on Jan. 9 that made Nguyen Thanh Hung's teeth chatter even when his wife, a nurse, covered him with blankets. But within two days, as the avian influenza virus took hold, his temperature soared to 106.7 degrees and peaked close to that level every day for the next five days as he struggled for life in one of this city's best hospitals. Most of his right lung collapsed, every joint ached and the far wall of his hospital room seemed to approach and recede before his eyes. [More - NY Times]

Japan Says Death Linked to Mad Cow
TOKYO -- Japan on Friday confirmed its first human fatality linked to mad cow disease after the December death of a man in his 40s. Health officials said the man had developed the brain-wasting illness in 2001 and may have contracted it while living in Britain in 1989, when that nation suffered an outbreak of mad cow. [More - LA Times]

4 February 2005:

EDITORIAL: Africa's Routine Misery
Every once in a while, something so awful happens in Africa that the rest of the world momentarily takes note of the continent. Twenty years ago, a devastating famine prompted Michael Jackson and friends to stage a nationally televised benefit concert that raised millions. More recently came the horrors in Rwanda and Sudan, prompting a lot of international indignation, if little else. Those crises duly acknowledged, people outside of Africa were free to look away again. Nothing much new is happening in Africa these days. It's the same old miserable routine -- 6,000 people dying of AIDS every day, thousands more, mostly children, dying from malaria, tuberculosis or malnutrition. [More - LA Times]

Condom Ban Divides Catholic Clergy as Health Concerns Grow
ROME -- A recent furor over what appeared to be rebellious Spanish bishops approving the use of condoms -- and the stern Vatican response that forced a quick retreat -- highlighted a quiet but intense debate within the Roman Catholic Church. When, if ever, is it permissible to use condoms to prevent death? [More - LA Times]

3 February 2005:

Chickenpox Vaccine Cuts Deaths but Raises Questions on Shingles
The vaccine against chickenpox has sharply cut the death rate from the childhood disease, according to a study released yesterday. But even as the vaccine protects children, questions are arising about whether its use will increase the incidence of a related disease, shingles, in adults. [More - NY Times]

Vietnam Is Seeking International Assistance to Fight Bird Flu
ANOI, Vietnam - Vietnam appealed for international assistance late Wednesday evening as bird flu continued to spread among people and poultry alike. [More - NY Times]

Vietnam Moves to Curb Bird Flu
Vietnamese authorities Wednesday ordered the slaughter or culling of all domesticated ducks in Ho Chi Minh City to stem surging bird flu outbreaks that have killed 13 people since late December. [More - LA Times]

1 February 2005:

Bird Flu Spate Signals Easier Transmission
After smoldering through the summer and fall, avian flu has erupted again in Southeast Asia with 12 confirmed deaths since late December, the latest a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who died Sunday. Thailand has reported widespread outbreaks among farm poultry, and Vietnam, where all the fatalities have occurred in the last month, now counts bird or human infections in nearly half of its provinces. The growing number of cases suggests that the virus may be mutating into a form that is more easily transmitted to and among humans, increasing the possibility of a pandemic. [More - LA Times]

New Entries on List of Cancer-causing Agents
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government on Monday added 17 substances to the official list of cancer-causing agents, including the first viruses: hepatitis B and C and some human papillomaviruses that cause common sexually transmitted diseases. [More - CNN]

Workshop to defuse stigma of HIV/AIDS
Patricia Green nearly lost her son in 1989. Instead of support, she gave him a cold shoulder after learning he had AIDS. "I was very afraid of him. I was afraid to be in the house when he was there. I wouldn't sit next to him," the Westside resident said Monday morning. It wasn't until I talked to him recently that he told me why he left and stayed away. He knew how I felt and didn't want to be part of that atmosphere. Today, that is still going on in our community." [More - Daily Bulletin]

31 January 2005:

More Than Just a Pesky Cough
The chronic, spastic cough started with what appeared to be a cold. A few months later, it was ruining Zachary Graham's life. The 16-year-old Sunapee, N.H., resident was often left gasping for air, gagging and unable to sleep. During one particularly ghastly coughing spell, Betty May Graham, Zachary's mom, feared her son was about to stop breathing. That incident led the family to a lung specialist who delivered a diagnosis that stunned the Grahams: Zachary had pertussis, also known as whooping cough, a disease far better known in the 1930s than today. [More - LA Times]

New Entries on List of Cancer-causing Agents
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government on Monday added 17 substances to the official list of cancer-causing agents, including the first viruses: hepatitis B and C and some human papillomaviruses that cause common sexually transmitted diseases. [More - CNN]

30 January 2005:

U.S. Is Close to Eliminating AIDS in Infants, Officials Say
AIDS among infants, which only a decade ago took the lives of hundreds of babies a year and left doctors in despair, may be on the verge of being eliminated in the United States, public health officials say. [More - NY Times]

After the First Few, Why No Flood of Vaccines?
Immunologist Ruth Guyer reflects on the discovery of the first vaccine by Edward Jenner in 1803 and the surprisingly small number that have been developed since then. [More - All Things Considered (NPR)]

Flu inches closer to Inland Valley
The flu crept ever closer to the Inland Valley on Friday as neighboring states reported more people coming down with the dreaded chills and fever. Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington joined 17 other states ranked in the second highest category of flu activity with regional influenza outbreaks, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. [More - Daily Bulletin]

About 230 People on Cruise Ship Become Sick
TAMPA, Fla. -- About 230 people aboard a cruise ship were stricken by a gastrointestinal illness while on a Caribbean voyage, forcing the trip to end early. About 200 of the 1,220 passengers aboard the Holland America ship Veendam became sick on the voyage, which ended in Tampa about 13 hours early. [More - LA Times]

29 January 2005:

Cosmetic Implants Link to Mad Cow Disease
Fears that cosmetic implants used in lips and cheeks could trigger vCJD, the human form of "mad cow" disease, have prompted the [British] Government to launch an investigation. [More - The Times (London)]

"Super bug" Infects Wider Inland Population
A virulent staph infection that in rare cases has led to serious illness and death is continuing to spread through the Inland Valley and California, according to county health officials. The bacterial disease, usually occurring as a localized skin infection, had been increasing in prisons and county jails, on athletic teams and in schools, and now is moving through the general population. [More - Daily Bulletin]

Staph Strikes Healthy Young Adults
SAN DIMAS -- Ryan Grumet contemplated his good fortune while staring at several medicine bottles filled with antibiotics. The 21-year-old telecommunications major from San Dimas just recovered from a bad infection caused by a "superbug" that is resistant to most antibiotics and is potentially deadly. [More - Daily Bulletin]

28 January 2005:

'Mad Cow' Disease Found in Goat
A French goat has tested positive for mad cow disease - the first animal in the world other than a cow to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). [More - BBC News]

Four More Die of Diarrheal Disease
KUPANG -- Four more people have died due to diarrheal disease in East Nusa Tenggara, bringing the total number of fatalities to 24. [More - The Jakarta Post]

Bacterial Meningococcal Disease Cases Grow to Three
VANCOUVER -- The number of confirmed or suspected cases of bacterial meningococcal disease in Clark County has risen to three, the county health officer said Thursday. [More - The Oregonian]

DENGUE: Chua: Children the Main Victims of Epidemic
KUALA LUMPUR -- The dengue epidemic has claimed seven lives in four weeks. But what is really troubling the authorities is that four of them are children and that the upcoming school holidays may present further opportunities for aedes mosquitoes to breed in school grounds. [More - New Straits Times]

Recent Immigrant Is First L.A. County Rabies Death Since '75
A recent immigrant from El Salvador who died three months ago from rabies was the first person in Los Angeles County to die from the disease in 30 years, health authorities said Thursday. [More - LA Times]

EDITORIAL: Secrets and Epidemics
The avian flu is known to have killed 32 humans last year -- hardly enough to trigger global concern, it seems. But viruses have a habit of mutating in ever more harmful ways, and there are signs that avian flu could be on the verge of turning into a much greater threat, capable of killing millions of people around the world. [More - LA Times]

CDC Moves to Ensure Surplus Flu Shots Aren't Wasted
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released 4.4 million doses of flu vaccine Thursday and all but withdrew its remaining restrictions on who could receive a flu shot -- moves designed to ensure that remaining vaccine stocks were not wasted. [More - LA Times]

26 January 2005:

Skin Bacteria Spread in L.A. County Jails
A virulent skin disease that resists common treatments continues to spread in the Los Angeles County jails, with about 200 inmates becoming infected each month, authorities said Tuesday. [More - LA Times]

25 January 2005:

Local Officials Prepare for West Nile Outbreak
Los Angeles County officials are bracing for another outbreak of West Nile virus following a deluge of heavy winter rains and unseasonably hot weather. [More - Daily Bulletin]

Millions of Lives on the Line in Malaria Battle
Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $43 million to efforts by a California biochemist to genetically re-engineer bacteria to grow a malaria drug normally grown in six-foot-tall plants in Asia. [More - NY Times]

Gates Pledges $750 Million for Vaccination Campaigns
The charitable foundation of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates pledged $750 million Monday to vaccinate children throughout the developing world, one of the largest donations ever. The contribution to the international Vaccine Fund will help fight... [More - LA Times]

Afghan Youth Hit by Whooping Cough
KABUL, Afghanistan -- U.N. and Afghan medics were airlifted to a remote province in central Afghanistan to vaccinate children against whooping cough after 25 youngsters died of the infectious disease, officials said Monday. [More - LA Times]

24 January 2005:

SARS-like Virus Found in Ill Kids
A newly discovered virus related to the SARS virus may cause several mysterious childhood ailments, including Kawasaki disease, U.S. researchers have reported. [More - LA Times]

23 January 2005:

Spread of Malaria, Dengue Fever Puts Them at Top of Watch List
Avian flu and SARS made headlines last year, but malaria and dengue fever should be on travelers' radar for 2005, experts say. That doesn't mean tourists should let down their guard against bird flu or severe acute respiratory syndrome, both of which may reemerge, travel medicine experts say. But several cite malaria and dengue fever as more likely threats. [More - LA Times]

About 230 Passengers Fall Ill on Cruise Ship
More than 250 passengers aboard a cruise ship fell ill with a stomach virus while touring the western Caribbean, cruise line officials said. About 230 of the 3,465 passengers and 20 of the 1,190 crew members aboard the Mariner of the Seas became sick after the vessel left Port Canaveral on Jan. 16 for a seven-day cruise. [More - LA Times]

Pope Reaffirms Church Opposition to Condoms
After several days of unusual public debate among senior figures in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed church teaching that forbids condoms and advocates abstinence and marital fidelity to stop the spread of AIDS. [More - LA Times]

22 January 2005:

Vietnam Reports More Bird Flu Deaths
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Vietnam reported the deaths of two more people from bird flu Saturday, pushing the toll to nine dead in three weeks, officials said. [More - Daily Bulletin]

20 January 2005:

Airline Drinking Water Flunks EPA Tests
In its new round of testing, the EPA sampled water from galley taps as well as bathroom faucets in 169 domestic and international flights, finding total coliform bacteria -- an indicator of potential disease-causing organisms -- in 29 planes. [More - LA Times]

19 January 2005:

THE NATION: Gays' Rising Meth Use Tied to New HIV Cases
Health officials and AIDS activists nationwide are alarmed at the increasing correlation between new HIV diagnoses and methamphetamine use among gay men. The drug's ability to heighten arousal and erase inhibitions is proving a deadly combination -- leading to sexual behavior that increases the chances of infection with HIV and syphilis. [More - LA Times]

17 January 2005:

THE NATION: Smallpox Exercise Poses Big Question: Is Anyone Ready?
During the Cold War, the United States, the Soviet Union, Iraq and several other nations produced vast quantities of ricin, botulinum toxin, anthrax and other agents for potential use in biowarfare. Not all stocks have been destroyed, however, and U.S. experts are anxious about the security of the smallpox cache in Russia. That was the setting for Atlantic Storm, as Friday's bioterrorism scenario was called. [More - LA Times]